POST C- Interview with Theresia

I was able to have a conversation with Theresia, a 3^rd year Product Design student at UTS who migrated from Jakarta and now lives in Pyrmont, Sydney. We spoke about the life in general and education after coming to Australia and how it feels in comparison to living in Indonesia

We were able to have a great casual conversation. We started of with talking the time she came to Australia with her parents and her younger brother at a young age about more than 10 years ago. We went straight into talking about visiting Indonesia, which she visits nearly every year in the holidays and said she is planning to visit there again at the end of semester. “When asked how it felt to have arrived in Australia for the first time? “She was to the point on the fact “it was basically hard for the firsts time…because everything changes, we have to say bye to friend to indo and I had to take care of ourselves” as when she was in indo “there were elderly to take care of me” and now that she was starting to live the typical Australian lifestyle as parents go to work and kids are alone at home “she had to take care of herself” which she expressed as huge change in her life.

As we moved on there was interesting revelation as we spoke about her expectations in the education system in Australia that in comparison to Indonesia. She went on to say her expectation were different starting of with her studies in 5^th year of primary schooling. She pointed out there was a needed to “catch up with the grammar” and the Australian slangs. It was also put into my attention when asked further about the intensity of entering schooling in Indonesia that the education system was harder in comparison and examples given were “if your not doing well, you had to repeat” and study period was “intense where we have to go early at 7 O’clock (am) and finish at 5 O’ Clock (pm), and the fact that tutors were needed for primary students as well as high school students. Theresia mentioned that she failed a year in Indonesia, but when she started her year in primary she was allowed to progress to fifth year straight away. This shows the different levels of intense study being practiced between the two countries, where one is strict the other being more lenient. One of the reason for this intensity is due to the fact that the Indonesia education system is a dismal enterprise because of corruption, a lack of resources, bad teacher training, bad teacher attitudes and practices (Readers Forum 2010, Jakarta Post). But the new administration under President Joko Widodo are fixing the issue with help from his new education secretary, Anies Baswedan, a former university president and creator of a programme that sends graduates to teach in remote areas ( The Economist 2014)